My FULL Review of NFS Unbound After 250 HOURS PLAYED

welcome to the militia Gaming Community on trigger and I've got 250 hours played in Need for Speed Unbound so I think it's time we do a full review let's go [Music] some of my opinions of Need for Speed Unbound have changed since my first early Impressions video titled 30 hours here's what I think this video is going to be a bit longer than my usual content because there's a lot to go over but basically there are both good and bad things about Unbound all I ask is that you watch the entire video before commenting because I kind of go hard in the paint on certain things and it's easy to hear a bad thing and want to immediately defend your own idea of that subject just hear me out first then please write me a thoughtful comment I will be reading them alright if I had to sum up the Unbound single player experience with one word I would say it was boring it starts with nearly a two hour prologue which kinda caught me off guard as previous Need for Speed games like Need for Speed heat had a very short campaign in fact I was able to speedrun the entire Need for Speed heat campaign in the same amount of time that it took me to complete the on bound prologue only under normal circumstances I would say that that's a good thing because it means the game is longer however the structure of it seems a little bit artificial it's like they heard the feedback of heat being too short and decided to overcompensate by artificially extending the campaign with the day and night progression cycle you see the only way to progress the story in this game is by leaving the garage completing an event or an activity and then returning to the garage you start out during the day and then move tonight when you return to the garage so there are two sessions for each day of the week and there are six days of the week and the seventh day is the qualifier and then there are three qualifiers in total and the grand finale which is called the Grand once you complete the grand the campaign is over and you move into what I call the end game but I'll talk about that in just a moment let me go over this one more time in case you missed it there's two sessions per per day times six days per week times four weeks that's 48 mandatory sessions outside of the garage three qualifiers and the grand each of those sessions will take you on average about 15 minutes if you only do one event and then return to the garage you can double that time if you do two events because there's no fast traveling in this game and triple it if you get into a police chase that happens to be a bit longer than you anticipate this means to complete the single player experience you're looking at around 12 to 24 hours of gameplay which is actually honestly fine the issue is that all 48 sessions outside the garage are basically the same thing exit the garage complete a race and then return to the garage cutscenes are far and few between and almost all of the storytelling happens in one of two places one when you're driving to a race the characters will speak over the phone or two when you get to the qualifier for each each week There's a cut scene it's just a boring way to progress through the game the qualifiers for each week serve as your goal for that week it tells you what level of car you need and how much money you're going to need to earn in that week to progress the story but you can earn those things in the first couple of days of the week making the rest of the week feel like you are grinding for cash that you don't necessarily need now if you like to customize every single car you own and buy a bunch of cars then you might enjoy the extra days to earn more money for those things but if your goal is to progress through the campaign it really gets old fast okay I feel like I've beat that dead horse enough so let's move on to the characters and the story itself this is where I'm going to be giving spoilers so please use the timestamps if you don't want to hear any specifics about the story okay the story is centered around Rydell and his shop you work for him alongside Yaz who ends up betraying you and Rydell and stealing your car then you have to race to the top of the street scene and come Heat against Yaz in the grand to win your car back you meet a very annoying character named Jess who literally can't stop saying the word bro she is supposed to be helping you but it turns out she's working for or with this unseen character named Alec who we basically know nothing about thus turning into the antagonist for both you and yes which breaks down the tension between you two and brings Yaz back to the good side when I say it like that it sounds alright but it's very predictable and the game gives you slight hints of what's happening the entire time on top of that like I said earlier the story is mainly told through voice lines and banter between the characters via phone calls when you're driving to an event or free roaming so if you're not paying attention during those moments it's easy to miss those lines that progress the plot I really can't say the story itself is bad like the overall plot is fine even though it's been done before but again my issue is with the delivery and the execution I just think the story could have been told in a better more engaging way Need for Speed heat story although short was told through a fair amount of cut scenes which I found to be much more entertaining than this and to be honest the repetitive gameplay really hurts the story some of the banter between Rydell and your character though was a little bit silly I found their father-son relationship slightly Charming at least until Rydell couldn't remember the phrase Need for Speed it was honestly one of the most cringy moments I've ever seen in a game and speaking of things that aren't memorable let's talk about ASAP Rocky's role in this game oh wait he really didn't have one you go through a very large chunk of the campaign before ever being introduced to ASAP Rocky and when you are introduced you have to listen to him preach about his way of life and his upbringing and his neighborhood which has literally nothing to do with the story then after that you start to see him in the race scene but for what he plays no significant role in the story he's literally just another NPC he's not for or against you and he's just a sideline character which I found super weird considering how hard they leaned into the fact that he was in the game pre-launch I'll admit I know almost nothing about ASAP Rocky in real life so there may be something I'm missing here but as a player of the game I just didn't see the connection at all it feels like they just used his popularity and fan base to sell sell the game and it didn't really integrate him fully into the story it was just a very strange decision and it felt very forced but let's move on to the difficulty of the game the difficulty of the story mode on challenging which is the medium difficulty was actually not challenging at all the AI were not super hard to beat which I guess is the way it should be especially for someone like me who understood the handling model fairly early I could see people struggling if they didn't figure out how the burst NOS works it's basically the key to driving fast in the game and the quicker you pick up on that the easier the game will be and the faster you'll be able to get to the end game end game is basically just unlocking every car and if you don't plan on playing multiplayer finding all of the Collectibles and completing all of the activities unfortunately when you are finished with the Grand and you win your car back you are still required to stay on the day night six day weekly cycle but wait it gets worse let's say you want to grind a specific race because it's fun or easy or rewards you with the most money well you can't because you can only race the event one time per session outside of the garage and in order to get back to that race you have to grind through the entire week day night day night day night until you get back around to the day where that race is available just to race it a second time it is absolutely the worst mechanic I've ever experienced in any game let alone a racing game once I've completed the story let me do what I want the way I want if I want to race the same event a hundred times because that will give me enough money to buy and customize all the cars I want so be it don't force me into a specific path of racing specific events alright I've been pretty negative up to this point in the video so let's talk about some of the good things I actually found the challenges to be a great way to extend the playthrough past the campaign without feeling like it was forced challenges can range from escaping a heat one Chase which should have been completed through playing the story to winning 30 a plus tier races the solo experience has its own challenges and rewards you with specific cars or driving effects or money and so it pays to go through and complete the ones that you missed during the campaign the end game economy in single player isn't all that bad either I think they were able to kick the ball right through the uprights right between two grindy and too easy if you simply race the top two events with the biggest payouts for each day and night session you will quickly build up cash to buy and customize cars you can win 50 000 or so per race depending on the day of the week and that can get you at least two Elite level parts for your car and even a new car as there are around 30 cars that cost less than that and speaking of buying cars and upgrading them the upgrade system is almost identical to Need for Speed heat except one very very important change each part actually does something noticeable to the car building cars in Need for Speed Unbound is a hundred times deeper than Need for Speed heat which is actually so refreshing and so frustrating for a content creator like me who's focused on giving you builds as fast as I can finding the correct combination of engine parts alone is a puzzle because each part increases your car's stats but it affects the car in different ways for example the aspiration options all have different timing of when they provide boost to the car each of the superchargers actually feels different to drive the tire compounds have a tremendous effect on handling and grip it's definitely a huge bright spot and a huge improvement over the old system even though it looks on the surface exactly like the old system each part has value so to build your car to its full potential it will take a lot of of testing and driving with that car it's a very deep foundational feature of the game which actually gives me a lot of optimism for the future of it provided that they do some post-launch support and speaking of depth Criterion managed to add some depth with the police chase mechanics each different type of cop has separate Chase mechanics requiring you to perform different types of evasion techniques this change is definitely a good one however they made the difficulty a little bit too easy not one time in my first playthrough that I feel like I was in danger during a police chase and by my second playthrough I had super easy Escape tactics that allowed me to run from higher heat levels with low level cars I think they may have adjusted the difficulty down a bit too much because Need for Speed Heats cops were a pretty big issue for a lot of people which again is fine I just think they went a little too far in the easy Direction I'd like to see a future update add a bit of difficulty to the police chases because right now they just feel irrelevant but let's get back to some good before we continue with the bad the handling model in this game is super unique my hat's off to the team that put together this set of mechanics there are multiple levels of depth to this handling model and they sort of reveal themselves to you as you get better at the game when I started playing the game I had a little bit of a shock to my system because I was so used to the driving in Need for Speed heat that my muscle memory was taking over and I wasn't paying attention to the differences but after spending a good amount of time driving I started opening my eyes to the possibilities at the center of the handling mechanics is the burst NOS this is the yellow bar that fills up when you perform certain driving Maneuvers like drifting or gripping Corners near missing traffic or cops and drafting other Racers this NOS is not like any other NOS in any other game it actually changes the physics of the game when pressed it propels your car in the direction it's facing and provides you with a tighter turning radius for a short amount of time it also allows you to take some of the craziest lines through corners which facilitates the most insane overtakes and a tremendous amount of fun driving fast in this game feels extra fast and super rewarding when you pop a burst NOS it's super hard to describe and I know I'm not doing it justice here but if you've played the game you know exactly what I'm talking about for those of you who haven't you're missing out on one of the most interesting and unique racing mechanics that exists today and then there's the grip and drift tuning yep you can tune your car to be better as a drift car or a grip car I was definitely on the drift bandwagon until I realized that gripping was actually faster it's very satisfying to full grip a corner and receive a full three bars of burst Nas coming out of it it's honestly one of my favorite things to do in this game is to pop that three bar burst criteria was able to do something for me that I've never felt in any other game and that is make gripping fun now I don't know how many of you actually had that same feeling but I just felt like other racing games kind of all do the same type of thing and that is making gripping part of racing but Need for Speed always had this drift side of it and so I felt it was going to be very difficult to make gripping fun and they were able to do it and honestly that's really the best part of this game the racing is insanely fun especially when playing with other people as I said in my previous review if you want to race other people you will have no problem doing so in this game even though the player base is smaller than it was at launch you can still load into a server send a race invite and about 70 percent of the time at least one person will accept your race in Need for Speed heat you definitely couldn't do that I would say it would be about 90 percent of the time that no one accepted your race invite but just a quick tip for those of you who play Unbound and have a hard time getting people to accept invites you have to think about what the other players on the map are currently doing it shows you on the map which players are currently in a race they will have little checkered flags on their player bubbles those are the people that are obviously there to race so you can wait until their race is finished and they are currently free roaming to send your invite you can also send invites when you see you know four or five people this sort of parked on the side of the road or driving around free roaming you'll have very good success with getting people to accept your race invites also if you have a friend or two it seems easier to get people to accept race invites because the more players in a race the more money everybody makes so players tend to wait until there's three or four people in the race before they decide whether they want to accept that invite the bottom line is everyone has their own agenda when they're in an online Lobby and there are only 16 players on the server at a time and that actually brings me to server sizes party sizes and general multiplayer experiences having only 16 on a server makes it so that getting a full 8 people in a playlist is a super rare occurrence most of the time you can get at least you and one other player in a race together and it's certainly not uncommon to see three to five players but eight is very rare and to be honest eight in a single race with randoms does get a bit crowded so I don't think they should go any higher per race five seems to be The Sweet Spot there unfortunately the amount of money you can earn is again directly tied to how many players except the race invite and finish the playlist of three races that means the amount of money you earn is largely dependent on other people it's not the worst thing but it definitely is frustrating when you get into a server where most of the other players are hunting for Collectibles or only racing b-tier playlists which has the lowest payouts it's also frustrating that if you start a race with five players in it and three of them decide to quit because you're destroying them you don't get the full payout for five Racers you only get the payout for two if it was possible for the devs to double the server size to 32 you would absolutely see more full playlists and the money grind wouldn't be as bad the other option might be a bit more technically possible and that is to allow us to form eight player parties as of this video the allowable party size is only four which means you still need to rely on four people outside of your party to accept the race invites in order to have the highest potential payouts you might be thinking so what you lose out on a small multiplier well the money grind in Need for Speed Unbound online is tiresome to say the least the max you can earn in an hour of playing is around a hundred thousand first of all a lot of cars cost more than that but even for the ones that are less than a hundred thousand you will need between two hundred and five hundred thousand to build them into the top three tiers and that's not including the engine swap if it's necessary that's also in addition to the money that you need to buy the car in the first place so let's do the math a little bit here a hundred thousand to buy the car five hundred thousand to build it into the highest tier that's six hundred thousand or six hours of racing and oh by the way that hundred thousand per hour I quoted you earlier yeah that's if you're winning the playlists and you have at least three to five players racing with you so as you can see a lot has to go right for you to make a decent amount of money and even at that it takes you forever to earn that decent amount of money guys like me who do this for a living can afford to spend the time to grind these races although it is very frustrating because I am trying to give you as many builds as possible but I would be willing to bet that most of the players only have a couple hours a day if not less to play games for them it takes a week to buy and upgrade one car it's just ridiculous and it feels like it was an intentional strategy to once again extend the game's life cycle but what it did was make players feel like they had to cheat or find glitches in the game to get more money fast and many of them did that especially on PC lots of cheat engine was used to get money which is actually so disappointing I think a proper economy in the game would have kept a lot of honest players honest and extended the play time now players who cheated just have hundreds of millions of dollars and the players who don't have time to grind have nothing and both of those parties have quit the game unfortunately it doesn't get any better the multiplayer experience right now is very Bare Bones the only thing to do is race and the types of race varieties aren't different enough to keep things in interesting as of publishing this video there are only about 44 different race tracks for multiplayer you can race all of them in about three and a half hours which I guess isn't too bad but because the money takes so long to earn you end up only racing the races that provide the biggest payouts and those are the eight S Plus races so the repetitiveness of that grind makes it so boring so fast I get the impression that they're gonna be adding things to the multiplayer over time so I do think it will get better and there will be a bigger variety of things to do however if they don't make the server size and party size changes I suggested earlier there will be difficulties getting other players to accept race invites if they add more activities more people will be distracted doing other things and not necessarily focused on racing itself the part that once again gives me hope with this game is that the foundation of the game is very fun when you are racing against other players the handling mechanics make the game super fun to play and the issues I've just described can and should be fixed I want to quickly cover customization as it is a big draw for Need for Speed games and I can happily report that it's on par with Need for Speed heat I don't find cars to be any more or less customizable in this game than in previous Need for Speed games in the franchise it's still the best customization out of any arcade racer ever so that's another win if you ask me I was hoping for a little bit more but it's absolutely fine where it is right now before I get into the last subject of the video the art style I want to correct a few things I said in my first impressions video I said that they seem to have fixed netcode and clipping on the map nope the net code seems to be almost as bad as heat and there are several major clipping spots on the map it really wasn't that noticeable at first but I think it's because I just didn't play enough to realize what was happening now it seems like every time I'm in a race with a friend there's a moment where the game doesn't properly keep track of where each of our cars is and we see two different things if I had a dollar for every time one of us in the group started a sentence with on my screen you and followed it by some ridiculous mumbo jumbo that didn't make sense to the other player I'd be a millionaire the great news is that they can definitely fix these issues the question is will they let's switch gears for a moment and talk about the last thing I want to cover and that's the art style this is definitely the most polarizing topic surrounding this game I've seen people in my own comment section debating whether it's good or bad they like it they hate it I will try my best to give you my most honest and balanced review of the art style I'll start with why people don't like it my impression based on many comments is that the majority not all but the majority of people who don't care for the art style have never actually played the game the reason that's important is because because the graphics and the wings and the burst effects and the tire smokes are not on the screen most of the time most of the time when you're racing you're gripping corners or driving straight and you don't see all of the crazy visual effects I've talked to several players in my community who were super turned off by the art style based on the trailers and the gameplay they had seen before launch but then actually found it to be much more subtle after playing it for themselves and a few of them actually started to see what I saw the second I got my hands on the game and that is that the visual effects actually enhance the feeling of speed and adrenaline when you're racing particularly with the burst NOS once again when you pop a three bar burst NOS you feel like you just went into light speed it's a feeling that you can't replicate in any other racing game the visual effects actually contribute to that feeling in a large way and I wouldn't have it any other way if you're one of the people who didn't buy the game because of the art style you are definitely missing out on one of the best racing mechanics ever made I've talked about a lot of negative things today and so I think the majority of people will walk away from this review with a negative impression of the game which makes me a bit sad but there's something about this game that is just so fun I don't know if it's the handling mechanics the burst NOS or the feeling that I'm actually being sat back in my seat when I accelerate off the line with a perfect launch I really can't put my finger on exactly why I love this game but my feeling is that it has some excellent foundational features and that's one of the most important things for any game let alone a racing game features the in-game economy races variety of things to do bugs and clipping spots all that stuff can be fixed with updates to the game but they can't just change the way Vehicles feel so it's a damn good thing they nailed that and despite my quarrels with the game's current status I'm super hopeful and excited to see what this game evolves into to over time I look forward to the day that the player base is thriving and more people can enjoy what could be one of the best racing games ever made so in conclusion this game has the most potential out of any racing game I've ever played and I truly do recommend you keep your eye on it if not buy it right now and experience it once this game is updated if it's updated well it will definitely be one of the best ever alright thank you so much for watching I know this was a long one so I appreciate all you legends that stayed through until the end shout out to all my heat 5 members of the channel I will catch you on the next one trigger out [Music] thank you

Channel: Militia Gaming Community

Views: 168,874

Keywords: nfs unbound full review, need for speed unbound full review, full review of nfs unbound, need for speed unbound, nfs unbound, nfs unbound is it good?, nfs unbound is it worth it?, FULL Review of NFS Unbound After 250 HOURS PLAYED

Id: N7evYPto20E

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023